MONTREAL - Winter descending over Décarie Blvd., combined with the sounds of Neil Young and Stephen Stills singing Long May You Run, cued a strong sense of seasonal melancholy as I stepped into Moonshine BBQ last week. The sweet and meaty slow-burning scent of barbecue, hanging in the air over the red and white gingham tablecloths, gave me something to hang my hopes on. Because the view from these hollow grey, car-exhausted blocks above the expressway was nothing short of soul-numbing.

Not a lot of walk-ins, I thought to myself as the door closed behind a swirl of browned leaves outside. The guy behind the counter, snapping on surgical gloves to transfer leftovers to takeout containers, explained that the joint does a fair amount of orders to go, since it’s not far from the Côte-St-Luc/Hampstead axis. The in-house customers, mostly men, a couple of whom I overheard discussing bold new exercise regimes, were focused on tearing into massive plates of meat. Moonshine BBQ is a masculine sort of place. Like no glass offered with my Red Stripe (not that I have ever had a problem drinking straight from the bottle).

I have had some stellar experiences with this type of cuisine — including a recent trip to the Barbecue Exchange in backwoods Virginia that would be hard to beat — which has become widely popular in recent years. This new address enters the scene on the tail end of the trend.

The wood-clad room has so many tropes of the modern restaurant scene, à la Food Network, that my expectations weren’t particularly high. Mason jars used as lampshades. Mason jars used for desserts. Food for the man’s man. Meats for meat’s sake. Heart and stroke challenges like the Champion, a $56 platter of derring-do in the form of four meats, four sides. It was feeling alarmingly like Guy Fieri territory.

But the team, which includes Epic Meal Time chef Shawn Dascal, is serious about what it does. The gargantuan smoker, custom-made in Missouri and shipped here for the summer opening, is an impressive piece of work. (Check out the scratch marks on the archway to the dining room for a clue as to how hard it was to get it into the space.) And the Quebec-raised meats, some smoked for up to 18 hours, that emerged from it were really good.

“Like brontosaurus ribs from The Flintstones,” I wrote in my notebook when my outrageously outsized order of half a rack of beef ribs arrived, weighing down a plastic tray piled with a mountain of tater tots, a block of cornbread and a bayou-sized portion of greens. “Flintstones!” commented a guy at the counter later, noticing that I had made barely a dent in those massive bones. Huge proportions aside, those ribs delivered. The meat was tender and not at all dried out, the bone clean beneath; it had a smoky flavour that held its own under the slather of pungent barbecue sauce.

As for the soft, fluffy, warm cornbread: c’mon, that was cake. I was informed that the kitchen had cut the sugar in half from the original recipes. Hard to believe. (Think pouding chômeur without the caramel.) All that said, I liked it.

The tater tots — presumably one of the items I periodically heard being plunged into a deep fryer that sounded like a swimming pool of hot oil — looked familiar from commercial applications. These and the sweet potato fries are apparently the only things not made in house. I loved the collard greens — such a great, hearty, nutritious winter vegetable.

Unabashedly hot, hit with flecks of chili and a touch of astringency, the leaves were not too wilted, for some very African-American (with an emphasis on African) flavours. A plain and oily mac and cheese didn’t have much to it; given the cholesterol onslaught, it was a relief that it wasn’t all creamed up.

When it came to the pulled pork, we needn’t have braced ourselves for too much sweetness before forking it in. This mound of cooked-down meat with a smear of sauce offered up balanced mellow flavours, with some actual protein structure left to chew on. I thought the chicken, with a faint smoky edge and a nice amount of residual moistness, was really well handled.

An order at Moonshine BBQ pays dividends in leftovers. “Pack it up!” was a frequently heard call to the kitchen. Along with “that’ll be great in a sandwich tomorrow,” in reference to both the chili and the rib meat. Copious portions are a bonus when you love the stuff, a burden when you don’t. Key lime pie, layered with sour curd-like pudding and graham cracker crumbs, was such a beast it was practically pushing up against the lid of a preserve jar it came in. But I didn’t like the bitter citrus taste or the sweetness.

There may be an aspect of barbecue culture that celebrates excess, but of course that should not be what it’s all about. But, still, how many restaurants offer to have someone help you carry your takeout order to your car?

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